Best Practices of Plone Development

1.6 Version Control 1 BEST PRACTICES FOR PLONE DEVELOPMENT
1.6 Version Control
1.6.1 Source Code Control
• Critical for teams
If your team is larger than one, source code management is essential. It will
allow your team to work together more quickly, with much less “stay out of
this; I’m working on it”, and much less “I’m not sure what this person was
doing here”. Hands-down, the successful implementation of SCM will be the
biggest win for your team’s coordination and performance.
• Helpful for code archaeology
When faced with old code of your own, or someone else’s code, seeing the
log messages and way it was built is often incredibly helpful in finding bugs
and maintenance.
• Branches
Often, you’ll work for a day or two on a new idea, only to figure out that it
isn’t working out, you’ve screwed up, and you can’t remember all the billions
of things you changed while on a tear to try out this new idea. This is exactly
what branches in a version control system are meant to manage.
Learn how to use branches for your VC system. They’re easier that even in
Subversion.
1.6.2 Version Control
• Subversion recommended
– Similar to CVS, but redesigned from ground-up
– Commits are for an entire changeset, not just files
– Easier to understand relationship of commits
– Sane API for utilities
• Zope isn’t involved at all w/version control
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